Creator economy unicorn Lightricks nabs $130M, $1.8B valuation

Lightricks, a company that develops mobile apps like the photo editor Facetune, raised $130 million to expand its suite of tools that target the creator economy.

The background: Based in Jerusalem and New York City, Lightricks offer more than a dozen popular subscription-based photo and video editing apps, including Facetune2 (173.8K Ratings on the App Store), Facetune Video (8.8K Ratings), and Videoleap (56.2K Ratings).

The news: Lightrick’s $130M Series D round further solidifies it as the creator economy’s newest unicorn, notching a $1.8 billion valuation and bringing the company’s total funding raised to $335 million. Lightricks plans to use the new capital to boost its creator apps, create new tools for professional creators, and kickoff strategic mergers and acquisitions. The round was co-led by New York-based venture capital firm Insight Partners and Tel Aviv-based Hanaco Venture Capital.

“Our mission has always been to continuously strive to bring creators the most advanced technology and help them find new ways to express themselves. The rise of the creator economy has only exacerbated the need of mobile users to streamline the content creation and monetization processes. With this latest funding, we’re able to help elevate our users' creativity and capabilities with continued advancements to our technology and offering.” —Zeev Farbman, co-founder and CEO of Lightricks

Why it matters: The creator economy is red hot and companies in the space are on track to receive more than $3 billion in venture capital in 2021 alone and nearly 3x more than in all of 2020. Investments in creator economy startups top at least the previous six years combined. While VC dollars is only one metric, the massive volume of investment further validates trends that are fueling the creator economy.

The numbers: Lightricks’ suite of apps has over 500 million downloads worldwide. Lightricks is tracking toward $200 million in revenue in 2021 and plans to grow that figure by 40 percent in 2022, TechCrunch reported. Lightricks users generate more than a billion creations per year on its creativity apps.

Strategic plan: Lightricks’ ultimate goal is to become the leading one-stop-shop for creators, offering them creative tools such as Facetune2, Facetune Video, and Filtertune, photo and video editing tools like Videoleap, Motionleap, Photoleap, Artleap, Lightleap, and Boosted, which is Lightricks’ social media toolkit for small businesses.

COVID, TikTok bump: The pandemic and the growth of the creator economy — now worth more than $50 billion and with more than 50 million creators — has been a key driver for Lightricks. The company reported a 90 percent increase in usage across its tools in the United States. Downloads for Videoleap — its most popular video editing app for creators — increased 70 percent since the start of the pandemic. More than half of Videoleap users are exporting media for TikTok.

Global footprint: Lightricks has 5 international offices and 460 employees. With the new funding round, the company plans to hire 60 new employees. Check out its gigs here as it has nine openings in "tech" and four in "creative & product."

Creator economy unicorns: There’s a growling list of creator-focused companies valued at more than $1 billion. Here’s a non-comprehensive list of creator economy unicorns:

• NFT marketplace OpenSea raised $100 million at a $1.5 billion valuation.

• MasterClass is valued at $2.75 billion after raising a total of $475 million

• Online course platform Kajabi raised $550 million at a $2 billion valuation.

• Personalized video shout-out app Cameo raised $100 million at a $1 billion valuation.

• Patreon raised $155 million at a $4 billion valuation.

• Audio-conversation app Clubhouse has raised $300 million in 2021 and has a valuation of $4 billion.

• Impact Tech is worth $1.5 billion after raising $275 million for its influencer marketing services.